DUSU contestants summoned to discuss cleaning of campuses

NEW DELHI: Delhi University has issued a notification directing 23 students who had contested their student union elections, including the current office-bearers, to attend a meeting on Friday to discuss the cleaning of public property defaced during the polls.

The notice came from the office of the dean of students’ welfare, which said the meeting was being held in compliance of a Delhi High Court order from last week. The court had asked stakeholders to meet to fix a course of action to clean up any public property that had been defaced with posters or paint during campaign season.

“I have to facilitate the meeting between the petitioner and the respondents. They will discuss a road map on how to clean up the campus and other public properties. A concrete plan will only come out after the meeting,” said Tandon, adding that there had been two meetings in the past.

Tandon said experts from the School of Planning and Architecture and Delhi College of Arts, as recommended by the high court, may also attend the meeting if necessary. Mahamedha Nagar, the general secretary of the DUSU and a member of the Rss-backed ABVP, and Kunal Sehrawat, the vice-president of the DUSU and a member of the Congress’ NSUI, said they had already taken measures like painting over any wall that had been tagged, and removing any posters with their names from the campus.

“The major problem right now is that the office-bearers are the only ones who seem serious about the clean-up. The others don’t attend meetings, let alone help cleaning up,” said Nagar.

Sehrawat said that during the earlier meetings, they had made some suggestions like installing democracy walls in all college campuses, providing electronic displays in and around campus to broadcast campaign videos, and increased campaigning time to avoid such issues in the future.

“The lack of time is the major reason why candidates use posters and pamphlets. We can’t cover the 52 colleges in the three days’ time to campaign. Ideally we should have at least 10-15 days’ time, but it is up to the university,” said Sehrawat.